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Nurses at Fairview Lakes Medical Center in Wyoming, MN, are fighting for contract advancements to protect patients, recruit and retain exceptional nurses, and to stop management efforts to take back hard-fought compensation and benefits.

Negotiations officially began in June, with management proposing to deny health insurance coverage and other benefits to almost a dozen nurses who work half time, increase mandatory low-need days by 50 percent, and continue inequitable pay differentials between clinic and hospital nurses.

Nurses are asking management to make a commitment to patients to ensure there will be adequate staff to care for them and to personally explain to patients if staffing falls below planned-for levels. Additionally, nurses are asking for improvements to wages and benefits. Sadly, management has failed to make efforts to advance patient safety or to provide nurses with a more secure economic future.

Nurses are calling on Fairview Lakes to:

Protect patients;

Address inequities between nurses who perform the same work;

Retain nurses;

Protect the future of nursing.

“Fairview should not try to increase profits on the backs of nurses,” Fairview Lakes Co-Chair Susan Kreitz, RN, said. “We are asking Fairview Lakes to put patients and the nurses who care for them first. That means addressing inequities including an unfair pay differential between clinic and hospital nurses.”

Nurses are speaking out about the unequal compensation of clinic and hospital nurses in a new video. The video highlights the high level of care clinic nurses provide to their patients and why clinic nursing is not of lower value than hospital nursing at Fairview Lakes.

Hospital nurses always make more than clinic nurses. They have to work weekends, holidays, evenings and nights. They take care of patients who are sicker and in need of more intensive nursing care than required of clinic nurses.

Then Lynne, Take the shift differential the Hospital Nurse is getting for working said weekends and Holidays into consideration, which is in addition to the $7 or more per hour my Co-workers at Fairview Lakes on Hospital scale are already getting….. The Clinic Nurses are on their own and dumped on from everyone above and below them…. I have worked in both Hospital AND Clinic and work just as hard if not harder with much less support, in the Clinics… Most of us are the only RN in our Clinics. If you think we don’t work as hard as Hospital RN’s, I invite you to spend a couple days at our Clinics…. I don’t feel the work I do is any less valuable just because I am in a Clinic…. A Nurse, is a Nurse.

It is detrimental to the health & wellbeing of nurses to work for any Fairview corporation. They have set-up a feudal hierarchy of thinking that even goes against the thinking of free-speech, much less a mind-set of masters and slaves. Fairview's excepted and promoted managerial thinking to do ANYTHING to get what they want (to keep their managerial jobs), including framing senior employees with lies to escape the senior's earned union privileges, is inhumane and unethical. When they don't care about their nurses, how can anyone believe they actually care about the wellbeing of patients??? Please forewarn any nurse applying for employment at a Fairview institution that her future health and wellbeing will be threatened, often successfully. The young ambitious narcissists in charge lack so much wisdom, they can't fathom themselves with the trials and tribulations that aging causes – but they will age too and their money won't protect them. Hopefully, they'll become victims of their own mismanagement and will have done to them what they have done to others!

Nurses at Fairview Lakes Medical Center in Wyoming, MN, are fighting for contract advancements to protect patients, recruit and retain exceptional nurses, and to stop management efforts to take back hard-fought compensation and benefits.